That Yummy-Yummy

Making Food Taste Great, Part 2

Greetings! 🥂

It seems we have a lot of bread 🍞 baking enthusiasts.

The last Substack on a Go-To Bread Loaf generated lots of DM’s, Twitter discussions etc.

This is helpful, as 🐙 will make sure to keep some content flowing on the dough/bread baking side of things. I was lucky enough to learn a lot of baking in a commercial setting and took that home to include maintaining 5 separate starters for a number of years and fully going down the baking, dough fermenting, rabbit hole.

Today we are going full circle on the discussion started last week on Seasoning!

This will be a total game changer with making your food taste better in all facets of your cooking. Understanding these basics and applying them (through tasting and adjusting before final service) will put you in the top 10% of home cooks.

Before we dive in… exciting January ☕️ Selections to announce!

Premium Coffee

Starting to see a lot of great feedback on the monthly coffee releases at Octopod Culinary!

This is a win-win to offer the best tasting, highest quality coffee’s available… while supporting the small artisanal growers all over the world.

It really is amazing to think about how these premium beans get from soil all the way to your cup.

The reason the coffee’s are sent out once per month, is that 🐙 has the coffee’s roasted and shipped out within 48 hours.

Why is this important?

Coffee has aromatics and flavors that will dull and degrade over time. If you’ve had a coffee over 6 weeks in your cupboard… it’s most likely no bueno.

This is why most commercial coffee’s are over roasted and extracted… to maintain the same “flavor profile” for months at a time.

Not so with what we’ve got here.

Take a look at the two offerings this month.

If your mouth isn’t watering… we got issues, capiche?

JANUARY SELECTIONS:

EL SALVADOR (BLACK HONEY PROCESS):

Tasting Notes:  Blackberry, Nougat, Chocolate

HONDURAS *SPECIAL BATCH (WASHED):

Tasting notes of Plum, Honey, Black Tea, Floral

This a very special, small batch coffee with aromas and flavor to remember!

There’s more info about the growers on the Order Page.

You can sign up for a subscription and get your coffee monthly, or just try a one time order to see how you like it. (Free shipping in the US!)

Seasoning Food, Part 2:

In Part 1 the concept of seasoning was broken down, primarily as it relates to salt. Then a thorough breakdown of the different types of salt.

However, seasoning your food like a pro only begins with salt. What follows is a continuation of Seasoning with salt, followed by a brief reference to using all 5 flavors to season your food to perfection!

Salty but not Salt:

When adding salt to your food, sometimes it’s desirable not to use salt but a seasoning agent (or condiment) with a high salt concentration. A few examples would be:

-Fish Sauce

-Soy Sauce (Shiro, Light & Dark are all types of soy with various levels of salinity)

-Maggi

There are many other seasoning agents in this “family” but you get the idea.

The important thing to note here is that when using these seasonings, it’s possible to overdue the flavor and still be short on salinity. Resulting in a flat/bland dish.

For example, you can add too much soy sauce to a soup, broth or meat prep but it still tastes flat. The result would be a cloying/bitter/caramel-y flavor that still tastes dull!

Same with fish sauce and maggi but with more funk behind it (which 🐙 likes a lot).

Moral of the story:

Use these seasonings up front first, but be careful… if the accompanying flavors are starting to overwhelm, simply finish seasoning your dish with sea salt or any of the other salts discussed in Part 1.

Salting Food: 

Here are some practical tips for properly salting your food.

When salting your ingredients, even-coverage is very important. This is one reason kosher salt is favored by most kitchens and chefs (although these days 🐙 rarely uses kosher salt, opting for sea salt. However, it’s much easier to over-do the salt. If just starting, use kosher salt). 

The most effective way to salt food evenly is to let the salt “rain down” from a height and let gravity naturally disperse the salt over the ingredients. Take a pinch of kosher salt and slowly hover over your ingredients 6-9inches and sprinkle the salt evenly over. 

This goes for meats/proteins, vegetables. Use the same method when seasoning ingredients in a saute pan, etc. 

Credit: my Meme Dealer DgenFren (If you’re not following on Twitter, you should)

Considerations When Seasoning:

Temperature: Our taste buds are most receptive to flavor molecules in temperature ranges between 85-99 degrees Farenheit. This is when you will have the “truest” expression of seasoning. But most food is served hot (think soup) or cold (think salad). So what then?

General rule of thumb, cold foods will require more seasoning. This makes sense as the lower temperature dampens flavor receptors. And remember, that as food cools, the seasoning will dull slightly.

Example: a perfectly seasoned soup will taste under-seasoned when chilled.

Cooking Subtleties: Salt, when added to ingredients naturally draws water out. This is an important factor to keep in mind when cooking. Example: Sweating vs Browning Vegetables. Particularly with Onions. If a recipe calls to sweat onions over medium heat, then add a pinch of salt immediately, to help pull more moisture out of the onions so they can sweat and not brown. Conversely, if a recipe calls for you to brown/sauté to brown the onions, wait until later to add salt so you can maximize the heat on the onions to produce more browning (aka Maillard reactions).

Salting Stocks: When making stocks a common practice is to not use any seasonings at all. In the grocery store you’ll even see low/no-sodium stocks and broths.

This rule came about when kitchens were making a lot of reductive sauces, where stocks are added and then heavily reduced. If the stock had seasoning it would be easy to have a salty/unbalanced sauce.

Nowadays if making stocks and broths, 🐙 recommends putting a small base layer amount in. Most people will be using stocks and broths at home for soups and pan sauce, which are usually starch thickened (corn starch, potato, AP flour, etc). Having a baseline of seasoning will help dial in your balance faster.

Flavor Hack: This is one of the best hacks I’ve ever been able to share with home cooks. People in general are confused by “how much salt should I add?” to recipes.

It’s a legit question.

Most recipes use salt measures in “pinches” or “dashes”. But over the years there has been a % number that works 99% of the time.

To get a dialed in seasoning with salt, the magic % seems to be 0.5% salt. (half of 1%). There may be some rare exceptions that go to 0.75% or down to 0.4% but the 0.5% is startling accurate and should be a go to reference.

This makes it simple. When you have a recipe with weights simply multiply your total weight by 0.005 and you’ll get your grams (or ounces etc). So for 454g of food, you’d add 2.2-2.3g of sea salt.

This works especially well for sauces, dressings, soups, broths, etc etc.

Give it a shot!

The Rest of the Flavor Wheel:

So we have, up until this point, discussed salt as a seasoning.

However, it’s important to remember that properly seasoned food is reliant on balance from all the 5 flavors (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami).

Below are some notes on the remaining 4 Flavors and how you can use them to sharpen your seasoning game and get perfectly dialed-in food… just like a Pro!

SOUR/ACID

This flavor works well in tandem with sweet. Sour flavor receptors are in clustered on the sides of the tongue. A lot of times, food that is dull or one-note need s a dash of acid to invigorate and amplify the other flavors and aromas already present.

Example: Classic Beurre Blanc sauce is made with a white wine/lemon juice reduction with copious amounts of butter emulsified in. It’s almost a guarantee that a squeeze of acid is needed when finished to cut through the sweet fat of the butter.

Some Common Acid Ingredients ⬇️

-Vinegar

-Citrus

-Pomegranate Juice

-Wine

-Tomato

BITTER

This flavor is vastly under appreciated in the West. It’s a shame, as most people’s palates have been bludgeoned to death by HFCS and refined sugars, in combination to heavy starch diets to the point where any bittereness on the palate at all is deemed offensive.

However, bitterness is an important and necessary flavor for balance.

Red wine braises, Oaxacan Molés and many more preparations require a healthy bitter flavor to balance. The bitterness adds depth and also structure on the palate.

Common Bittering Agents ⬇️

-Red Wine (tannins)

-Citrus Pith

-Coffee

-Cocoa

SWEET

The most “pleasing” flavor to most people. The sweet taste buds reside at the tip of the tongue and perceive sweetness upfront, as one of the first flavors on the palate.

It’s easy to to pigeonhole sweetness for just desserts, but it is a vital part of savory cooking. Use sweetness to round out vinaigrettes. The Italian agro dolce (sweet and sour) sauce would be harsh and unpleasant without the counterpoint of sweetness that is just heavenly.

Don’t neglect sweetness as a seasoning. A vital part!

Some common sweeteners ⬇️

-Honey

-Agave

-Sugar

-Molasses

-Balsamic Vinegar

UMAMI

This flavor was discussed in depth on a previous Substack… I recommend to refer back

Kitchen Cocaine

You can think of Umami as a “depth” seasoning. It makes food more “meaty”, mouth filling, etc.

This provides a gem for seasoning food that lacks depth, may come across as thin, insipid or “missing something” on the palate. Used judiciously you wouldn’t even know it’s there… until it’s missing!

Some Common Umami Seasonings ⬇️

-Dashi/Kombu

-Dried/Cured Seafood (eg: bonito flakes)

-Fish Sauce

-Tomato

-Mushoom

-Soy Sauce 

-Bouillon Cubes

This should get you well on your way to eating tastier food!

Making 2022 the tastiest year ever is the priority… if you want bulletproof recipes that taste amazing, get on the paid Substack for access to all previous recipe drops… and the future ones!

Coming Soon… The Best Homemade Risotto and an EZ Duck technique that will have your family and friends thinking you’re a Master Chef!

Until Next Time! 🥂